Advocates of open access are quick to bemoan the 'paywall' that keeps people from reading research findings. The adoption of open-access publication does not eradicate the paywall, but instead moves the cost burden in front of researchers themselves. Open access has been around long enough for us to recognise that its cost cannot be borne by the external funding of individual research labs. There are also sincere academic-integrity concerns about scholars paying money to have their work published, especially as many open-access journals are run on a for-profit basis. In a sense, open access is - or can be - payola. The only source of integrity is the faith that the editors are acting honourably.

Although many scientific journals try to provide more details about author contributions by requiring explicit statements, such contribution statements get much less attention than authorship order, according to new findings from a Georgia Tech-University of Passau team. The authors found that while researchers evaluating a paper consider contribution statements helpful for understanding the specific skills individual team members brought to the study, they still use author order for deciphering which researchers did how much of the work and deserve most of the credit. Authorship is a topic that looms large on the minds of researchers. Publications play a major role in career advancement at universities and research institutions, and authorship order is a widely used, but imprecise, way of inferring contributions from researchers. In part, the problem with contribution statements is that they aren't always available, and when they are, the statements tend to have no uniform structure.

Once faculty members write, submit and have articles published in magazines or journals, copyright is transferred from the author to the publication. This restricts readership to those with access to that specific publication. But with Open Access, that is changing. Open Access is a principle-based movement, largely driven by university professors and librarians, to transform academic publishing so that everyone - not just those affiliated with wealthy institutions - has access to high-quality information found in academic publications.

Simplifying access to the right information across the organisation has become the mantra for the successful, research-driven enterprise - but it is only the first step in an enterprise-wide knowledge management strategy. So, how do biomedical and drug discovery researchers effectively transform information into useful knowledge in the Big Data era? The answers lie in how the magnitude of available information is being harnessed and exploited. With at least 50 million scholarly journal articles already filling information pipelines, and more than 2.5 million more added each year, the ways content is discovered and utilised by scientists and technologists working at millions of companies, must evolve.

Universities rely on published research to bolster the school's reputation as well as the researcher or academic's own prospects. However, as jobs at premier institutions become harder to obtain, experts suggest scholars have increasingly begun to submit research to these predatory journals knowing well they are not legitimate publications - an act experts call academic fraud because it wastes taxpayer money, chips away scientific credibility and muddies important research, according to a recent The New York Times report. Experts cite more than 10,000 of these journals in recent years. Many of those publications' names mimic the names of well-known journals. These journals have few expenses because they do not seriously review submitted content before publishing it online.